Category Archives: TDD

I was speaking to a colleague recently during one of our fortnightly tech forums and he mentioned a specific class that he found difficult to get under test. The problem was that the constructor of the class was attempting to instantiate and configure new objects that were difficult to setup in a test harness. When you are faced with a constructor that instantiates classes internally there are a few different ways to break these dependencies safely. This article describes some of them and the reasons for using each one. Continue reading →

Whenever I need to add a new feature to some legacy code I attempt to add some tests around the code before I start making changes. This ensures that I don’t break the original purpose of the code. This is not always easy though as some classes and methods can be difficult to get into a test harness. One example I will talk about now is that of the Irritating Parameter, which was pointed out to me in the book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Robert-Martin/dp/0131177052. If you haven’t read this book I thoroughly recommend it as it explains ways of breaking dependencies to get classes under test, which I have found can be difficult when working with legacy code and large systems.Continue reading →